The heights of fashion

A playful shot of a model from the house of Fath,1954, with a bodice brassiere, a lace overskirt and black lace-topped stockings

Drusilla Beyfus

12:18AM BST 15 Sep 2007

The rarefied air of the Parisian haute couture shows have been the haunt of the privileged few since the Second World War. A new exhibition at the V&A looks at the legacy of couture and of the women who wear it. By Drusilla Beyfus

Luxury means different things to different people, but it is safe to say that during the post-Second World War decade, luxury was an haute couture dress. A forthcoming costume exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum attempts to explain why. A couture dress took 200 hours of human effort from conception to delivery - one, a design embroidered in gilt and silver thread by Christian Dior, took 600 hours. Couture-level dressmaking calls on textiles and embroideries that often are works of art, and wearing couture has long been considered the essence of elegance.

Focusing on the decade 1947-1957, the exhibition looks at the outfits, the couturiers and the role of the private client. The period was 'the zenith of French couture, when designers such as Dior, Balmain, Jacques Fath and Balenciaga led the way, and headlines in London and New York were held for the latest news from Paris,' Claire Wilcox, the curator, says.

Although the main houses survived on the strength of selling their toiles (design templates in cotton or linen) to American and British dress manufacturers, the private patron remained and remains the symbol of haute couture. From the beginning of its history, the high classification stood for bespoke dressmaking according to practice laid down by the regulatory body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, established in 1868. Ginette Spanier, the directrice of Balmain during the period, sums up the discipline expected of its members in the catalogue: 'If a seam was not quite right, it was a matter of life or death.'

Paule Boncourre, who worked for 10 years from the age of 15 in the workshop at Christian Dior in order to become a qualified hand, has said that in haute couture, 'Everything is in the technique; the reverse must be as beautiful as the face.'

Everything was also in the exclusive fabrics used, the vegetable-dyed tweed, the silks, satins, velvets and lace. The exhibition features what the curator acknowledges as 'a symbiotic relationship betweeen the French textiles industry and the couture houses'.

Details of the relationship between private client and couturier are generally kept under wraps, so it is intriguing to be able to examine a particular case. Lady Alexandra Dacre has contributed 14 of her Paris couture dresses, personal correspondence, a memoir and photographs to the exhibition. She was married to Captain Howard-Johnston, Naval Attaché to the British Embassy, 1947-50. Her second marriage was to the historian Hugh Trevor- Roper, who became Lord Dacre. The daughter of the First World War Field Marshal, Earl Haig, she was born in 1907 and died in 1997.

Lady Alexandra came to fashion-conscious Paris in 1948 from austerity Britain. Eleri Lynn, an assistant curator at the V&A who writes on her in the catalogue, points out, 'As an Embassy wife she would be expected to attend many dinners and balls, for which she would need a glamorous wardrobe.' Jacques Fath was to be her man, and his salon at 39 avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie her happy hunting ground.

Lady Alexandra writes unaffectedly in her memoir: 'It seemed unbelievable to be in the luxury of Paris after wartime England, where everything was still rationed… there were wonderful clothes. I had quite forgotten them in the war. A French friend took me to see Jacques Fath, who liked tall models. He made an arrangement with me whereby I would be lent two evening dresses and two day dresses every season, which would be made to measure.

'If there was a Fath dress I wanted to keep, I could pay the sale price at the end of the season. I was not allowed to go to any other house but I did not want to - Fath was perfection. He made hats too! So I could be dressed by him from top to toe. My life in Paris became like a fairy tale.' At his salon Fath would dress her, draping fabrics around her and moulding garments to her shape.

When Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edin-burgh visited Paris in 1948, Fath lent Alexandra some dresses to supplement the ones she already had. 'I seemed always to be changing my clothes,' she writes. At a gala at the Paris opera during the royal tour she put on a long white satin evening dress with a bodice decorated in agate-coloured embroidery. She writes that as she and her husband climbed the marble stairs the Garde Nationale suddenly sprang to attention and she realised they had mistaken them for the Princess and the Duke. 'That is the effect made by my splendid Fath dress.'

Her daughter, Xenia Dennen (née Howard-Johnson), filled me in with some details about her mother. She believes her mother's love of fashion stemmed in part from the fact that Alexandra's mother, Lady Haig, an acknowledged beauty, had put her daughter in 'horrible clothes' as a child.

'Fath liked her because she was the right shape, height and colour and he liked brown hair,' Dennen told me. She mentioned that her mother wouldn't slavishly follow the couturier's dictates and had a mind of her own. An instance was her dress for her wedding to Hugh Trevor-Roper. It was a cocktail outfit in two pieces, made in brown wool and embroidered in gold thread. The dress was cut with a bared shoulder line, shoulder straps and a skirt falling from a defined waistline in soft pleats to just above the ankle. A cropped jacket with narrow sleeves and broad collar transformed an evening outfit to daywear. A velvet hat completed the effect.

Lady Alexandra was not allowed to alter the original designs but none the less she decided to have her wedding dress made up in the wrong side of the fabric. 'My idea, because the colour of the right side did not suit me.' It was for such commissions - one does not order a wedding dress every day - that the friendship between client and vendeuse mattered in particular. Lady Alexandra's vendeuse was Madame Dufy, sister of Raoul, the artist, and directrice of the house. Lady Alexandra wrote following the wedding dress order, 'Madame Dufy was very thrilled. I think she sensed that I had not been happy in the past.' After Fath's death in 1954, Lady Alexandra took her vendeuse with her to the house of Jeanne Lanvin.

How did Fath see his tall, thin, brunette Englishwoman? The models suggest that in true Parisian style he liked to improve on nature. He would employ pleating at the hip, sashes, big bows, belts, bodice embellishments and full skirts, all of which modified the straight lines of her physique but always keeping the best of what was distinctive about her height and slenderness. He put her in narrowly cut sleeves, V-necklines, prints and colour. A day dress in the Johnston tartan with a bodice decoration was done specially for her. The catalogue notes, 'Fath was well known for his daring and often contrasting use of colour, and the Johnson tartan suited him well as he particularly liked the sea green. Most elegant ladies only really wore black or brown.'

Fath was unusual among Paris couturiers in being a dandy himself. He and his wife Genevieve, who ran the business side, were a couple whose own parties, balls, dinners were regarded as part of the social season. 'Self-taught… he had a skill for what would become increasingly important to the world of fashion - publicity,' Eleri Lynn writes.

Like many of the outfits shown, Alexandra Dacre's cache of clothes were originally collected by Cecil Beaton for the V&A in the late 1960s and early 1970s as examples of 'the best of women's fashions of today'. It culminated in an influential exhibition, 'Fashion: An Anthology', at the museum in 1971, which was an early alert to the legacy of couture.

He explained his pitch thus: 'I would hope to flatter the donors by only asking for specific garments that I had seen or admired.' His letter to potential donors proved persuasive and stressed that dresses contributed would be those he considered should be preserved as historical documents. His yardsticks were the designer, the status of the owner and on certain occasions, the circumstances in which the item was worn. Beaton's biographer, Hugo Vickers, says that he was so successful that Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Onassis's sister, complained that after a visit from Beaton she had nothing left to wear.

Alexandra Dacre was an enthusiastic and conscientious donor. She wrote to Beaton about some of the things she planned to send to the museum, 'I can date the grey dress and the white taffeta dress with black spots exactly because I had them when I was expecting my youngest child. The dresses were not altered in any way except that they could be let out. Afterwards, they were altered by Fath to fit my normal size, without charge.' She writes that she had hurriedly taken off a rose with a black velvet stalk and leaves (from another dress) and sewed it on to the white taffeta, which had lost its rose. 'The original was larger and more floppy than the one I had put on and had a rosebud. It did not have black leaves.' She adds, hopefully, 'Your department could probably find another rose.'

The show makes clear who patronised which couturier and who, by implication, had the foresight to save their things from the jumble sale. Several donors have been photographed in dresses they sent illustrating how the outfits were worn and with which accessories.

Gloria Guinness (Mrs Loel Guinness) is photographed with her daughter Dolores, both sporting evening Balenciaga, by Henry Clarke for French Vogue. The former spread her patronage among a number of houses, including Dior, Courrèges, Givenchy, Lanvin, Castillo and Jeanne Lafaurie. Eugenia Niarchos, married to the Greek ship owner Stavros Niarchos, is photographed with her sister Athina Onassis, later the Marchioness of Blandford, both in evening clothes, the former in classic Dior, the latter in draped Jean Desses. Of Eugenia, Hugo Vickers remarked, 'She was the perfect couture client - beautiful, stylish and exceedingly rich.' Beaton had said that she was 'about the only person who could afford to order one of the incredibly beaded dresses that Dior had designed'. On her death in 1970, Stavros Niarchos honoured his wife's promise to Beaton and handed over 19 items including the beaded design.

Among the clothes donated by the Queen is a long-skirted regal confection by Norman Hartnell with his characteristic embroidery that she wore on a state visit to Paris in 1957 and in which she was widely photographed.

All the donors, the Queen excepted, are likely to have placed orders at the shows held for private clients. Admittance to a couture collection was (and still is) rigorously controlled; it is very strictly by invitation only. Bettina Ballard, a fashion editor of American Vogue (1946-54), remarked, 'It is a brave woman who walks in unknown and unheralded to spend. There is no place more flattering to be received as an habitué and friend, and no place that seems more impenetrable if one is not known.' A new client required a referral from the right source, customarily a friend or relative known to the respective house. Your contact would provide the name of a vendeuse, or the directrice of the salon would assign a vendeuse to you.

One month after the first showings and delivery of commercial orders, private customers were permitted to step into the Paris haute couture. 'Here indeed was woman's secret world,' quotes the catalogue, 'the battlefield where the struggle against the ravages of age was carried on with the dressmaker's art and where fortunes of money were spent in a single afternoon.'

Private clients made their appointments through their vendeuse to see the fashion shows at which daywear, afternoon clothes and evening dresses would be shown by the house models. They were held daily from 2.30pm to 5pm at the salon in an atmosphere that was famously airless, with closed windows, lots of flowers and the house perfume sprayed in the air. A client would be offered an elegant gilt chair and given a programme so she could make notes on the pieces that took her fancy. Insight into couture model prices during 1948 can be gleaned from an entry in Cynthia Gladwyn's published diaries. She was the wife of Gladwyn Jebb, later Lord Gladwyn, who was then in Paris with the United Nations. The diarist comments, 'The fashions were beautifully cut but fantastically expensive, even with the franc devalued to 1,100 to the pound: an evening dress could be 300,000 francs, a day dress 100,000, and a mere dressmaker would charge 30,000 to copy a design.' Prices were closely guarded, but a Dior New Look day outfit with a jacket and skirt was priced at 59,000 francs in 1947 (this was almost 10 times the cost of an off-the-peg day dress from the West End store Marshall and Snelgrove).

Once a garment was ordered it was the vendeuse who acted as liaison between the house, the workroom and her client. She arranged for three fittings for each order and delivery. Most original models were altered to some extent to suit the figure and requirements of the individual client.

There were routes other than paying the house price for acquiring a couture outfit. If a client's size happened to chime with one of the models who showed the clothes, they might be able to buy the original garment after it had been shown in the salon a few times. Sometimes customers changed their minds, or their bankrolling admirer did, and the reject ended up in the sale. Couture designs, always ahead of ready-to-wear collections in terms of style and line, were snapped up for copying by small dressmaking businesses. In The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley, Nancy writes to her sister Diana in 1947, 'To cheer myself up I went and ordered a suit at Dior. The skirt has stays which one tugs at until giddiness intervenes - the basque of the coat stuck out with whalebone… terribly pretty. I shall have it copied in white linen so I can wear it the whole summer.'

The uninitiated may wonder what it was about an haute couture outfit that persuaded clients to part with improbably large sums. Frustratingly, one of the means by which one might form judgements, photography, doesn't tell the full story. A skilled shot of a smart high-street dress may well appear to be not dissimilar from a couture design and certainly no guide to the huge price differential.

Closer to the truth are remarks about the transformative effect of haute couture. Jean Dawney, a model for Christian Dior, catches the mood in her remark, 'A Paris dress makes one feel as if one could charm a pearl out of an oyster.'

A thank-you note from one of Pierre Balmain's private clients reads, 'It gave me a taste for life again. Never mind the dress: its sheer arrival was enough, carried by a man in uniform, in its enormous new box.'

Alexandra Dacre in her correspondence with Cecil Beaton comes close to a practical understanding. She writes, 'I adored all my clothes from him [Fath] and continued to wear them as they never seemed to go out of fashion. The dress made for my wedding was worn and worn.'

It is a fact that through cut and creativity a couture design can do wonders to improve the appearance of the proportions of the body of the wearer, restoring a person's physique closer to the ideal.

None the less, it is natural to speculate on the future of haute couture as it represents such an impenitent display of personal consumption; additionally the exhibition is likely to be viewed against a dicey stock market and a go-green attitude to our glad rags. The metier survives today in a handful of fashion houses, where once there were hundreds. When held, the collections are 'often extreme and extravagant', Wilcox writes. 'Their role is to garner publicity and provide inspiration.' She told me, 'I hope couture doesn't die. It's very important to retain the craft of couture. These skills once lost become extinct - the tailoring, the embroidery, the weaving, the quality.'

'The Golden Age of Couture:Paris and London, 1947-1957', is at the V&A from September 22 to January 6. 'The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London, 1947-1957' by Claire Wilcox (V&A Publications) is available for £31 (rrp £35) plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0870-428 4112; books.telegraph.co.uk)